Making Wait. Warp! in 11 Hours

Wait. Warp! represents one of the overall fastest dev-cycles for any of the jam games I've made at just 11.5 hours total (Within the first 30 minutes, GameMaker crashed and I lost my work, so it's technically closer to 11 hours on the dot). The game's core puzzle mechanic was inspired by the Pokemon Ice Path puzzles, but with an addition of real-time hazard dodging. My goal was to create a "puzzle" game with replayability. My hope was that through a combination of  real-time elements and alternate paths, players would attempt the game multiple times to see how quickly they could complete it.

Visuals

Throughout the first few evenings of development on the game, it looked like this;

Then I overhauled the artwork, wrote an auto-tiling script, and got it looking like this;

Hazards and goals looked a little too plain, so with some last minute effort, I was able to add in some simple animations on them;

Level Design

I went into the last day of the jam with only 3 levels, of which I ended up changing 2. I started making a few levels with multiple characters and realized you could get some really neat puzzles if I allowed players to collide with each other. Despite having only a few hours left, I reworked the warp script to move each player one at a time in a loop until it was determined that either a player had hit a wall, or hit another player that had hit a wall. This system was robust enough to support as many characters as I could throw at it, though for the jam I stuck to two. In the time I had left, I got the game up to a modest count of 12 levels;

That said, I was decently happy with the levels I constructed. As evidenced by the level names, the game explores a few key concepts, roughly increasing in terms of complexity within each batch. This was very much an effort to focus on quality over quantity; if the game took off, then I could always add more levels later.

Post Jam Changes

Once the jam was over, I had a chance to actually watch a few streamers try Wait. Warp! I decided to tweak the design of a few of the more difficult levels; not to remove the challenge entirely, but to allow for alternate paths. In addition to fixing the auto-tiling system and a few known bugs, I also added a new mechanic to the game along with 5 more levels;

I don't want to make endless levels just using the same tiny batch of levels, and while I have plenty of ideas, I feel happy with wrapping things up on this project.
Lastly, I added a display for the time it took to complete the game. I'd love to see if anyone can beat the game in under a minute!

Final Thoughts

I was really happy with the reception of the game, so I consider it to be a pretty successful experiment of "light puzzle solving" while mostly being a reflex challenge. Considering that LowRezJam runs for a total of 2 weeks, the fact that I came up with this idea with only 5 evenings and a single weekend day to make it, I hope that goes to show that sometimes, you can still make a great game out of a simple idea, even without the most time to develop it.